Tarnished Ex-President Reaches Out to Mexico

For three days, former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari suddenly has been the talk of the town again here, as the Reforma newspaper has been splashing on its front page installments of the first interview he has given since he slipped out of this country almost two years ago.

And while the former president’s proffered views--including his declared intention to return to Mexico--have left some politicians shaken, they apparently have not stirred a more favorable public sentiment for the once revered and now reviled Salinas.

Most analysts and politicians said Friday that Salinas broke his 22 months of public silence simply in an effort to boost his image and pave the way for him to come home.

“To present my voluntary departure as exile is inadequate,” Salinas said in the interview, whose headline Friday included the phrase, “I have much more to say.”

“It is not exile, nor do I plan to remain outside the country,” he said. “I will return to Mexico.”

Don’t hurry back, was the sentiment on the streets of the capital, where children still clown for passers-by in bald, elephant-ear Salinas masks and corner kiosks sell Salinas dolls attired in prison-stripe uniforms.

Consider, for example, the thoughts of Ruben Lopez Trinidad, 65, a driver interviewed outside a downtown hotel.

“Salinas shouldn’t come back here,” he said emphatically. “No one wants him.”

In his Reforma interview, Salinas--who was viewed as one of his nation’s significant modern economic reformers and progressives until Mexico suffered a stunning economic crash that many here blame him for--clearly wants to defend his place in Mexican history.

He praises his ambitious free-market policies and sweeping privatization program, which he says was run well and cleanly, although it since has been the subject of corruption and influence-peddling investigations.

Salinas, who left office Nov. 30, 1994, asserts that his administration was free from drug corruption, though that too has since been fodder for official investigations.

Repeating earlier statements that he had faxed to news organizations soon after he left Mexico in March 1995--within days of the arrest of his elder brother, Raul--the Harvard-educated economist insists that his brother is innocent of charges that he masterminded the September 1994 slaying of Francisco Ruiz Massieu, then the No. 2 official of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Salinas claims to know nothing about how his brother, who is imprisoned outside the capital and is charged with illegal enrichment, amassed tens of millions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts.

Salinas does acknowledge that he should have paid more attention to his brother’s activities.

As for Mexicans--politicians and just plain folks--they were suddenly paying plenty of attention again to their former leader, who has lived in Canada, Cuba and now Ireland since he left Mexico for the United States after bickering with his handpicked successor, President Ernesto Zedillo, over who was to blame for Mexico’s economic crisis.

Zedillo himself has not commented on Salinas’ remarks.

But opposition leaders warned that Salinas’ return--indeed, the Reforma interview itself--could be dangerous for a nation in delicate transition.

Salinas’ comments in his six-hour talk with Reforma Editor Ramon Alberto Garza in Boston earlier this month “opened a Pandora’s box and a controversial debate that is going to convulse the nation,” Felipe Calderon Hinjosa, president of Mexico’s largest opposition group, the National Action Party, warned Reforma in reactions published Friday.

Leaders of the PRI--the party of Salinas and Zedillo--were more circumspect.

“I have the impression that this series, edited in a very specific medium, only is giving information that more or less the Mexicans already had,” party President Humberto Roque Villanueva said.

But on talk radio and in other media here, some Mexicans on Friday were finding more significance in the Salinas interview, which also appeared in El Norte, Reforma’s sister paper in Monterrey.

His comments fueled all manner of conspiracy theories: Some speculated that the former president was breaking the tradition of his office by speaking out instead of quietly fading away because he would eventually attempt a political comeback; others theorized that he was trying to boost his brother’s image. And there were unconfirmed reports Friday that Pablo Chapa Bezanilla, the chief special prosecutor who jailed Raul Salinas, is himself under investigation for possible misconduct in the case.

Meanwhile, Mexico City’s attorney general, Jose Antonio Gonzalez, said Friday night that a body found in the backyard of Raul Salinas’ ranch last year is that of a relative of the psychic who led police to it. Gonzalez said the body, which had been dead three years, had been planted on the Salinas ranch. He said the psychic has admitted planting the bones and has been arrested.

Chapa told reporters in October that he believed the body was that of Manuel Munoz Rocha, a federal lawmaker who was indicted in Ruiz Massieu’s murder and has been missing since soon after it took place.